Was the water supply of Avebury as patchy in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic as it is now?

It’s been a wet winter at Avebury. My recent attempts to visit Windmill Mill and West Kennet Long Barrow have resulted in wading through rivers where normally there’s no water at all. And it got me thinking maybe I could write about this. Some of the following is based on my understanding of geology and maps, some is based on an English Heritage Report.

Avebury and chalk

Avebury, and the surrounding Neolithic monuments, are all built over chalk bedrock. Chalk is a highly permeable rock due to being full of tiny holes and, more importantly, bigger cracks. It allows water to flow through it very easily.

The permeablility of chalk has some interesting effects on the landscape. This is because rain, when falling on unsaturated chalk (i.e. not already full of water), tends to disappear into the ground without ever flowing across the surface. Valleys in the chalk often contain no streams (why the valleys are there is another story). Instead, the water flows relatively slowly underground.

The upper surface of this underground water ‘reservoir’ is known as the water table. Due to changes in rainfall, temperature and vegetation, the level of the water table varies annually, going down in summer and up in winter, generally reaching its highest around February.

Occasionally, such as in wet winters like this one, the chalk will become so full of water that the water table will reach the surface to emerge as puddles or flowing streams. In larger valleys these streams can become frequent enough to be called rivers.

An example ‘winterbourne’, north of Aldbourne

The Winterbourne & Kennet rivers

One such established, intermittent river is called the Winterbourne. This river is so named because its course is usually completely dry, but the river reappears in wet winters. Normally the maximum depth of the Winterbourne is about half a metre. This year the rain has made the Winterbourne almost 2 metres deep in places where it is confined. Where unconfined, it is much shallower but can be tens of metres wide. The evidence of the geology in the area (e.g. extensive alluvial soils) suggests that the Winterbourne may have been a more substantial stream in the past (perhaps in the early Holocene) than it is now.

The Winterbourne flows from north to south. At its southern end it is met by another ‘winterbourne’ just to the west of Avebury. A little further south it probably was once met by an even smaller and more intermittent stream coming in from Beckhampton to the west. From this point downstream the river is called the Kennet. Here, the course of the river turns east, ultimately joining the Thames.

Even the more substantial Kennet, which is not seasonal, is normally less than half a metre deep near Avebury. Sometimes, it too can reduce to a trickle or even dry up (and this doesn’t appear to be much affected by modern water pumping).

This means that, due to their unreliability, sources of water have historically been a problem for those living around Avebury. In summer people have either had to rely on the trickle of the Kennet, or on springs such as Swallowhead, or on wells which have been dug down into the chalk to reach the water table several metres below. This probably explains why settlements have always been limited on the chalk downland.

Avebury, the Sanctuary, the Avenues and water

Avebury sits on a section of dry ground just to the East of the Winterbourne. In normal years the water table wouldn’t even reach the ditch around the ancient stone circle, although it may well have filled the bottom of the ditch as it was when first excavated in the Neolithic.

The Sanctuary sits on a hill approximately 25 metres above the Kennet. It is unlikely ever to have had its own water supply and, as such, makes a poor location for a house. However, it’s still no more than 300 metres to the north of the Kennet, so you can always go down there with bucket.

Avebury’s eastern Avenue of stones ran along a valley from Avebury either down to the river or up to the Sanctuary. It’s southwestern end appears to run alongside a small, intermittent river course, although this hasn’t flowed this year and I’d guess didn’t during the Neolithic. For comparison, the now lost western Avenue from Avebury to Beckhampton takes a course across the Winterbourne and doesn’t appear to follow any intermittent stream. I therefore suspect that the Avenues have little to do with river courses.

Silbury Hill and water

Silbury Hill is a bit weird. This is not just because it’s a large earthen mound, seemingly without any point to it. It’s also that it sits on the edge of the Kennet River’s floodplain, just below the point where the Winterbourne becomes the Kennet. The ditch around Silbury Hill, dug out to make Silbury Hill itself, is usually dry in summer. In winter, more often than not, it is completely filled with water due to the higher water table, and this water can become linked to the Kennet.

Silbury Hill is not the only large Neolithic mound to have been constructed in a river valley close to the water table. Marlborough Mound, in Marlborough College, is of much the same age and is similarly positioned, right next to the Kennet but further downriver. To the south, Marden Mound (now sadly flattened), at the head of the Hampshire Avon, was also located in a similar position, right next to the river.

This has led to one interesting theory, posited by one Lothar Respondek, that Silbury Hill was the result of a primitive form of well digging, the primary aim of the Hill actually being the ditch itself. Certainly, the theory has some merit, in that Silbury Hill is strangely positioned to be easily seen, down at the bottom of a valley. Contrary to what Mr Respondek himself thinks, most experts think that Silbury was constructed at a time when the water table was higher than it is now. However, it doesn’t entirely invalidate the idea if the ditch was supposed to give a summer water supply.

Another feature, pointed out by Paul Whitehead and Mike Edmunds, is that Silbury Hill is sited just at the boundary between the Lower And Middle Chalk formations. The significance of this is difficult to fathom but may relate to the different flow patterns of water in the Middle Chalk, which would have been easy, and the Lower Chalk, which is broken up by clay layers, possibly resulting in the emergence of springs at this location.

Either way, the connection between Silbury and water does seem significant.

The West Kennet Enclosures and water

Two large, oak palisaded enclosures (currently known as Enclosure 1 and 2) also sat right by the Kennet River, just to the east of Silbury Hill and a little downstream, during the late Neolithic. These were built around the same time (approximately) as Silbury Hill. Excavations of these structures by Alistair Whittle and his co-workers in the late eighties and early nineties showed that Enclosure 1 even straddled the course of the present day Kennet, although the Enclosure 2 lay on the south bank of the modern river.

Oddly, the major evidence for occupational debris in these apparently short lived enclosures was the abundance of piglet bones in the ditches. More recently, similar piglet debris at Durrington Walls (near Stonehenge to the south) has been strongly argued to be the result of winter feasting.

There has been some suggestion, based on the excavations at Durrington Walls, that such enclosures were occupied only seasonally, probably in winter. Certainly, there would be a more stable water supply at this time of year. However, siting the enclosure on the river might not be the best idea then. This year, the land just to the south of the river, once part of the enclosures, is completely flooded. Even though this is an exceptional year, it certainly isn’t the only time in recent years that this section of the river has flooded. If the experts are right then this problem is likely to have been worse in the late Neolithic. This makes it odd that the people who built these enclosures didn’t site them somewhere drier, but still by the river, for example on the north bank. Maybe we’re missing something here.

Whatever, the problem of water supply should perhaps be taken quite seriously in the study of why the monuments of Avebury are located where they are.

References

Whitehead, P. and Edmunds, M. 2012 Silbury Hill, Wiltshire: Palaeohydrology of the Kennet, Swallowhead Springs and the siting of Silbury Hill, English Heritage Research Report 12-2012, pp35.

An excellent report on the hydrology of present and past Avebury.

Respondek, L. 2005 The Mystery of Silbury Hill: Why Was it Built? Elar, pp72.

Not a daft book, but sadly without references, so about as valid as my posts.

Acemoğlu and Robinson rightly argue in ‘Why Nations Fail’ that chance decisions by leaders play a big part in economic success, but using the Congo Basin’s Lele and Bushong as an example of this may be a mistake.

Ilebo dock, on the Kasai River (picture by Thomas Tvergaard)

One significant argument in Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson’s fascinating and highly informative recent book ‘Why Nations Fail’ is that a considerable degree of chance, or ‘contingency’, controls the rise of economically successful states and nations.

What they particularly mean by this is that the actions and decisions of individual leaders can have huge effects on outcomes – a sort of economic butterfly effect.

Now I guess that this must be true. In a modern world with cheap(ish) oil, and global transport even of the cheapest commodities, the policies of Chinese leaders have made a huge difference to the development of China. But I feel that Acemoğlu and Robinson have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in trying to explain some prehistoric and marginally historic events purely on the basis of this kind of chance.

Chance in the pre-modern world

Once upon a time transport and economic success was a matter of making do with the waterways, seaways, passes and ridgeways that geography provided. Because of this, I suspect that some places were naturally better endowed for creating and accumulating wealth than others. This had nothing to do with the choices of leaders.

Acemoğlu and Robinson do not take such considerations into account in their book, even arguing against their significance.  Instead, in three examples, they make the case that community or leadership decisions alone caused the major outcomes seen in certain prehistoric and marginally historic events.

Their first example is the agricultural revolution in the Middle East in the tenth millennium BC. Their explanation for this, against the views of many (including, famously, Jared Diamond), is that it was the decisions taken by local leaders that caused the development of a creative society with an agricultural base just here at the end of the Pleistocene. Acemoğlu and Robinson may or may not be right in this. Either way, the hypothesis is untestable.

Their second example is the collapse of the Maya civilisation of the Yucatan Peninsula, Central America in the first millennium AD. This example, which really deserves a blog post of its own, says that Maya collapse was simply due to bad leadership. Others, again including Jared Diamond, view the collapse as a result of climate change or the over-exploitation of the land by the Maya. Other explanations are equally possible.

However, it’s Acemoğlu and Robinson’s third example, on the divergent paths the Lele and Bushong peoples in the Congo Basin around the seventeenth century AD, that I want to talk about here.

Lele and Bushong

The Lele (aka Leele) and Bushong (aka Bushoong) are two groups of people living on the Kasai River in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two well known academics, Mary Douglas and Jan Vansina, independently studied these groups in the late 1940s and 1950s, near the end of the Belgian colonial era.

Map showing the Congo River Basin between 16th and 17th century, showing the distribution of kindgoms and peoples in and around the basin. The map includes the distribution of dense forest (green) and the more important rivers (wide black lines are navigable rivers). Also shown are the distributions of copper deposits (orange areas marked CC), including the large copper deposits of  Katanga in SE Congo. Note the later southern caravan route (dotted) from the coast at the head of the Cuanza River into the interior and the Zambezi. This approximate route used by slave traders from the end of the seventeenth century and by Livingstone in the nineteenth century. Finally, dashed lines mark the approximate outer limits of major kingdoms during this time.

The Lele and Bushong live, respectively, on the left and right banks of the Kasai. Both groups inhabit an area at the boundary where classic jungle in the north gives way to more open forest in the south. The Lele live on slightly more sandy, less fertile soil which is more prone to drought, but in other respects the environmental differences are small. Lele and Bushong languages are closely related and mutually intelligible (sharing perhaps 80% of words).

What struck Mary Douglas at the time of her fieldwork was the huge differences in habits between the two groups, even taking into account the small differences in their environments. Bushong men and women appeared to be hardworking, working from their late teens to their mid sixties (like most of us). They were technologically relatively advanced, had many belongings, were collaborative, generally monogamous, married young and sought to become financially well off. The population density was estimated (once other factors had been taken out) at around 3.4 per square kilometre.

On the other hand the Lele, and men in particular, were portrayed as lazy, working only from their thirties to their late fifties (oh bliss). They were technologically backward, selfish, had many wives (limited to preparing food and keeping house) but only married when old. Indeed, in later life men jealously guarded their rights to the village women and to easy living.

The young men, presumably due to sexual frustration, were warlike and frequently raided other villages to get their kicks. Even the things that the Lele prided themselves on, such as hunting and fishing, they were worse at than the Bushong. Population density estimates here were around 1.7 per square kilometre.

In terms of trade, the Bushong produced a number of goods for exchange, including crafted items and a surplus of food. Before colonialism they had used shells, copper and beads for currency in this exchange. Conversely, Lele men produced only a smallish quantity of fine raffia cloth, their one item of exchange and currency (but, interestingly, something that they made better than the Bushong).

Kuba titleholder’s hat – made with shell, ivory beads and copper

From Acemoğlu and Robinson’s point of view, the important difference between these societies is the degree of organisation and centralisation. The Bushong represented the wealthier citizens of the Kuba Kingdom. According to Vansina’s reading of oral history, the Kuba Kingdom had been established by the unification of Bushong and other groups around their first king, Shyaam a-Mbul a Ngoong-Shyaam, possibly an immigrant, in the seventeenth century.

Acemoğlu and Robinson argue that it was the decisions of Shyaam that caused the differences between the Lele and Bushong. They argue that he gave the kingdom a well established bureaucracy and laws that gave the Bushong people some rights within this system. These rights caused the economic success of the Bushong. The Lele, outside the kingdom and never subject to such wise rule, were left relativedly poor and socially fragmented to the level of villages.

Thus, according to this reading, the Lele and Bushong had equal chances in the lottery of life, yet only one made good on those chances. Personally, I suspect that some more mechanistic reasons for these differences should be taken into account in weighing up the development of Lele and Bushong.

A bit of history – the fall of Kongo and the rise of Angola

When Portuguese explorer-merchants first managed to sail to the mouth of the Congo at the end of the fifteenth century they found an existing African trade network which they, at first, simply joined in with. This network was controlled by the Kongo Kingdom and its satellite dynasties.

At this time, river transport was about the most effective method of moving goods from the interior of Africa to the coast. Much, but not all of the Congo River system was navigable and provided the major highway between coast and interior in this part of Africa. However, the section of the Congo River between the coast and Malebo Pool was not navigable. This was the part controlled by the Kingdom of Kongo, centred on Mbanza Kongo (later renamed San Salvador).

By dominating this area, Kongo regulated the flow of prestige goods such as ivory, copper, gold and slaves coming from the interior, and of nzimbu shells and raffia cloth travelling from the coast (to south and north) back into the interior. It was not a huge trade system was it made a comfortable living for the leaders of Kongo.

The Portuguese merchant seamen were initially able to extend the coastal trade networks to other coastal African kingdoms further north, acting as middlemen and profiting in the process. Presumably, this also profited Kongo. However, slaves soon turned out to much more valuable to them.

At first, this was because the shortage of labour in Europe after the depradations of the plague meant that manpower had a high price. But soon the establishment of sugar plantations in Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe (and subsequently the Caribbean) required a larger input of slaves to work on theses plantations instead. The Portuguese paid for these goods with manufactured European ‘luxuries’ such as coloured glass beads, brass and fabric, as well as alcohol, guns and the new crops of the New World.

Initially Kongo started to export slaves in small numbers to the Portuguese to satisfy this demand, both doing well due to their monopoly in the early sixteenth century. But this brought competition both from African neighbours to north and south and from other European sailors.

The Loango, further north, bypassed the Kongo kingdom to get direct access to the Congo Basin and supplied slaves to British and Dutch sailors. Groups to the south, in alliance with Portuguese settlers, found other sources of slaves by raiding their Angolan hinterland. These suppliers of course had lower overheads. The kingdom of Kongo, unable to compete, and itself increasingly a target of slave raids by the new traders, collapsed in the late seventeenth century.

But besides causing the collapse of the Kongo state, the Portuguese had another effect in the Congo Basin. By introducing maize, (and possibly cassava and tobacco) from the New World to the African coast it also resulted in improved farming yields for local farmers, promoting the growth of African populations (thus guaranteeing the supply of slaves). This didn’t just affect the Portuguese controlled coast, though. Maize rapidly resulted in the rise of populations inland, beyond the area of Portuguese ‘influence’.

The new slaving ‘kingdoms’ and the rise of population bizzarely had the effect of increasing Africa’s internal east-west trade in prestige goods which had existed before the arrival of the Portuguese. Reorganised or new kingdoms inland, such as the Lunda and Luba, appeared in order to control these expanded trade opportunities. By the end of the seventeenth century new overland trade routes were even appearing between the Angolan coast and the Lunda kingdom, avoiding the Congo Basin altogether.

It was during this upheaval that the Kuba Kingdom is supposed to have come into existence. And it seems to me that its location, at the confluence of the Kasai and Sankuru Rivers, was not by chance.

Ilebo and its strategic location

Lands upriver of the Lele and Bushong, showing the much greater extent of land confined by the Kasai and Sankuru Rivers and how this connects to the Lunda heartland and, in part, to the Luba.

A quick look at Google Maps will show that there are important differences between Lele and Bushong territories. The first clue is the location of a river port called Ilebo, which sits above the confluence of the Sankuru and Kasai rivers, at the western edge of traditional Bushong territory. Ilebo was the largest settlement in central Congo before colonialism, with a population of five thousand people

Ilebo has acted as a river port since the seventeenth century AD. This small trading hub was the heart of the Kuba Kingdom. Interestingly, river transport (or what’s left of it) is still central to Congolese transport and Ilebo is still an important lifeline for trade toward the coast. Currently, Ilebo sits at the head of the railway line leading to the Katanga copper mines in southeast DRC (formerly in Luba territory). This railway line is now due to be renovated using Chinese money and expertise.

This immediately points up a difference between Lele territory and Bushong territories. For Bushong territory sits at the head of a number of rivers all draining lands of the Luba and Lunda kingdoms, including the Lunda capital of Mussamba. In the case of the Lele, they sit at the head of a very narrow catchment linking only to the margins of Lunda territory.

From the seventeenth century onward much trade from the Luba and Lunda kingdoms must have gone direct to the coast over the land route, without going through the Congo Basin at all. However, there must still have been a significant flow of prestige trade items between the coast and the interior (particularly Katanga) through the Congo Basin. It’s therefore useful to look at what trade routes would have been likely.

Terrible map showing guessed at trade routes, both by river (blue) and overland (red)

From what I can see, natural routes for transport from the southern kingdoms of Luba and Lunda into the Congo Basin, even if on land, tended to be confined by, and to funnel into the confluence of the Kasai and Sankuru Rivers, somewhere around present day Ilebo, within Bushong territory. This is the natural set of routes for the movement of copper, gold and ivory northward. This is still the case with the present railway.

On the other hand, the Lele had no extensive hinterland of commercial interests. The difference in scope for trading upriver was huge and the Bushong clearly had the advantage over the Lele.

Chance and the growth of states

I suspect that the Kasai-Sankuru confluence has been a good place for trade long before the arrival of the Portuguese, but perhaps on a small scale. I would argue that the rise of the small Kuba Kingdom in the seventeenth century, with the Bushong at its centre, is a story of growing populations and increasing trade, due ultimately to the riches gained from the coastal slave trade. The Bushong, in the right place to pick up that trade, developed systems, specialisation and complex lawcodes as a result. The Lele, who were in the wrong place, did not.

Of course chance plays a part in this. The Portuguese may never have turned up, for a start, due to some kingly edict telling them to stop shipbuilding. The Earth could have been hit by an asteroid just as the Portuguese were weighing anchor. I don’t deny any of this. But what I’m saying is that taking the origins of Lele and Bushong as an example of good or bad decision making is a mistake. King Shyaam could help to make this trade more effective by his actions or he could hinder it. However, I don’t believe that he created it.

References

Acemoğlu, D. & Robinson, J. A. 2011 Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Profile, pp464.

Diamond, J. 2012 What Makes Countries Rich or Poor? New York Times Review of Books (website)

Douglas, M. 2010 (1962) Lele Economy compared with the Bushong, In: ‘Perspectives on Africa’ (2nd ed) (Grinker, R.R. et al. eds.), Wiley-Blackwell, p123-138, (originally from Douglas, M. 1962 The Lele Resistance to Change, In: ‘Markets in Africa’ (Bohannon, P & Dalton, G.), Northwestern University, p??)

Fage, J.D. & Tordoff, W. 2001 A History of Africa, Routeledge, pp640.

Kwamikagami – Navigable sections of the Congo Basin (from Wikipedia)

Mitchell, P. J. 2005 African Connections, Alta-Mira, pp328.

Oliver, R. & Fage, J.D. 1962 A Short History of Africa, Penguin, pp301.

Robinson, J. A. 2011 World Economic History – Lecture 5 (pdf), Harvard – source summarising many points of the book.

Sahlins, M. D. 1971 Stone Age Economics, Aldine-Atherton, pp348.

Vansina, J. 1990 Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa, James Currey, pp448.

Wolf, E.R. & Eriksen, T. H. 2010 Europe and the People Without History (2nd ed), Univeristy of California, pp536.

Pictures

Bortolot, A. I. 2003 Kingdoms of the Savanna: The Kuba Kingdom, Metropolitan Museum of Art website – source of titleholder hat image

Traditional Music of the Leele, volume 9 of Anthologie de la musique congolaise  - album cover

Photos of Kuba at Nsheng, 1947.

Thomas Tvergaard’s photos from his trip across central Africa, 1997.

Discussing whether the abundance of strange wildlife memorabilia in a place like Çatalhöyük happens when settled people kill all the local big game and become gradually disconnected from their hunting roots.

In a nearby country town there is an old hotel. On its wood-panelled walls are images of red coated ‘gentlemen’ on horses, and their hounds, all giving chase to some unseen fox. What’s missing in this hotel, but perhaps lives on in English country houses, is the other part of this display, the heads of wild animals or the unfortunate fur rugs.

Such fly-blown relics of another time are considered much less desirable to most people in Britain now. Fox hunting is currently illegal, but even before the ban it was already much less widespread than a hundred years ago. Taste’s change, I guess. But why did the pubs and the country houses have such paraphernalia at all? And what’s it got to do with Çatalhöyük?

‘Art’ at Çatalhöyük

The chronology of art and other features at Çatalhöyük, based on Mellaart and current work from the Çatalhöyük Research Project (click to enlarge)

When James Mellaart started to excavate the early Neolithic settlement mound of ‘Çatal Hüyük’, southern Anatolia, in the 1960s he revealed unusual figurative artwork in certain buildings among the mass of poky houses. This artwork didn’t appear to match anything seen in contemporary societies of the Fertile Crescent, further east.

The following list is not exhaustive but gives an idea of some of this ‘art’ and at what period different types of figurative artwork seemed to occur in the houses. I shall attempt to make the list chronological (it should be mentioned that level V contains little evidence of any artwork)

Bull bucrania and horn cores

Bull bucrania are the tops of wild bulls’ skulls, including the horns. Bucrania and horn cores were generally found buried in plaster ‘bulls’ heads’ in walls, or were set in rows on benches in the northern halves of some houses. The bulls’ heads were often decorated.

Much rarer were rams’ horns or bucrania and rams’ heads. Other animal bones included the jaws of wild boar and other smaller wild animals, embedded in plaster ‘breasts’ within the walls.

Apart from in some cases in level VIA and B most of the bull bucrania and horn cores appear to have been removed before demolition of the buildings. Bucrania date from CH level IX to at least level II  (about 6850 – 6200 BC), becoming rarer after level VIA (around 6400BC). Animal heads disappear altogether after level VIA.

Paired Leopard Reliefs

These painted plaster wall reliefs show side profiles of two animals, probably leopards, touching noses as if mirrored. They appear between levels VIII and the end of level VI (about 6650-6400BC). They are rare, being confined to the ‘leopard house’. However, here these reliefs were maintained and refurbished repeatedly.

As Ian Hodder has pointed out, the lack of leopard bone on the site suggests that whole dead leopards may not have been brought into the settlement, which he believes is due to some taboo. Whatever, the pairing of the animals suggests a cult element to the reliefs.

‘Death’ paintings

There are various paintings recorded by Mellaart from levels VIII to IV (about 6650-6300BC), showing headless people and ‘vultures’ or people dressed up as vultures, as well as a couple of paintings possibly showing a mortuary house and dead people’s heads. They appear to relate to a period of burial decapitation and skull preservation and are presumably cult-related.

‘Mother Goddess’ or ‘bear’ reliefs

These wall reliefs, again in painted plaster, are unusual in showing a possibly splayed figure with limbs sticking out at right angles, upturned at the ends. They date from levels VII to the end of VI (about 6600-6400BC).

James Mellaart, on the basis of an apparent swollen ‘bellybutton’ on one and the presence of plaster bulls’ heads beneath some of them, thought that they were women or ‘goddesses’, giving birth to animals. This suggests a very cult purpose. However, Ian Hodder found evidence for a matching form on a later stamp seal that strongly suggests these are animal reliefs, probably of bears.

Perhaps most interestingly, the heads and ‘paws’ of these plaster reliefs were always broken off when a house was demolished and built over. While this may again suggest a ritual or cult purpose, it seems just as likely to me that the reliefs were plaster ‘fake bear-skin’ wall hangings (?possibly with the insides facing inward). If this is true it may be that real skulls and paws were embedded in the plaster and that these were removed when houses were demolished, as was the case with many bull bucrania and horn cores. I’ll come back to this point.

Sunk relief animals

Little known, these animal pictures, the best of which appear to be bulls, were recorded by Mellaart on walls upto level VI A (6400BC). They were made by stripping off multiple layers of plaster in the shapes of animals then replastering and painting the resulting depressions.

The ‘volcano and town’ or ‘leopard-skin’ painting

This is a one off in CH, dated to level VII (about 6500BC). As James Mellaart pointed out, the painting appears to show a volcano exploding over a town. The nearest volcano is Hasan Dağ, which would have been visible in the distance and was probably active at the time, so the image could be a contemporary representation of CH.

However, a more recent interpretation is that the ‘volcano’ is in fact a headless and pawless (and hence boneless) animal skin, perhaps of a leopard, and that the rest of the image is abstract (like many other paintings across walls in the site). This would be interesting as the lack of leopard bones on the site does not preclude the presence of bone-free leopard skins.

Hunting scenes

These are later than the above features, occurring between levels V and III (perhaps 6400-6250BC) and seem to represent quite a change in art style. The pictures show scenes of animal ‘hunts’ where a wild animal, perhaps wild bull, deer or boar,  is surrounded by people.

The animals are large, dwarfing the people, are male and appear to be simultaneously sexually aroused and dead. The people, almost all men, are drawn like stick men. They carry weapons and are shown rushing around and looking somewhat overheated. They often, but not always, wear ‘leopard skin’ around their waists.

After level III there’s no more hunting or wild animal related art, unless that is you count the famous statue of a  ‘Mother Goddess’ resting between two leopards from a grain silo in level II (around 6200BC). In fact ‘Mother Goddess’ art now predominates, as it does further East.

Statuettes

Cult statuettes, both of animals and people, made out of both clay and stone, appear throughout the later CH sequence from level VII onward. Many stone figurines, including ‘mother goddesses’, date to level VIA, but this is probably a reflection of their loss in the fire that happened at this time, and it may be that they existed earlier but were not normally buried or thrown away. The classic clay figurines of ‘mother goddesses’ with leopards occur later in the sequence, in levels III and II.

Discussion

‘Hunting memorabilia’

It would be wrong to call the wild animal and hunting-related materials above simple ‘hunting memorabilia’. People’s reasons for putting trophies on their walls now are generally egotistical and have no religious aspect. I don’t think that the people of CH would understand this idea. Their world was probably full of significance. If they put the skin of an animal on a wall it would have meant something deeper.

It would also be wrong to see the later hunting paintings, as with all the paintings, as simply nice decorations. They appear only on certain layers of plaster and are often obliterated by later plasterings. Some may have been shown for much less than a year.

A possible sequence of events

It seems to me that the succession of events here could be telling a story of some sort (one that’s probably not a million miles from Ian Hodder’s). CH is unusual for this period in showing little evidence of domesticated cattle until very late. Other sites further east show evidence of cattle domestication as far back as the early eighth millennium BC, well over a thousand years before what’s described here.

A simple suggestion, which has been made before, is that the people of CH were descended from people indigenous to the area, not from farmers further East.  Maybe they were local hunters who had turned to a settled life for other reasons (perhaps trade, perhaps obsidian though maybe not). This would certainly help to explain the preponderance of ‘hunting memorabilia’.

These settled hunters took on many of the trappings of agriculture, such as growing wheat and barley and herding sheep and goats. Limited evidence suggests that CH did have immigrants into its population (as suggested by recent dental studies) and some of these, perhaps from the East, could well have contributed to this hunting-farming balance. However, the dominant culture was, apparently, one celebrating the joys of the hunt. There is nothing like it seen in contemporary Eastern Turkey or Syria.

It seems to me that many of the paintings and reliefs discussed above could show how the population of CH went from being hunters to just pretending they were hunters. There’s no doubt that most of the bull bucrania came from wild animals. These can easily be seen as trophies of the hunt. But I suspect that they came to be increasingly valued and significant as the animals became rarer in the countryside round about.

If the idea of bear skin wall hangings is right then this shows such an effect well. I’d suggest that initially real bear skins might have been hung on walls as significant ‘trophies’. However in the damp conditions of the houses these skins decayed with time. Eventually, people, unable to replace them, started faking bear skins on their walls with plaster and paint, using the surviving bones to give the fake skins some sense of deeper meaning, connected with the original wild animals that they came from.

After the fire – hunting in story

A great fire or series of fires appear to have swept through the settlement around the end of level VIA (around 6400BC). This may have damaged or destroyed much of the hunting memorabilia in the settlement as the evidence for very high temperatures shows. After this time there are no recreated ‘bear skins’, plaster leopards or animal carvings and few bucrania.

For perhaps a hundred years after this people painted hunting scenes on the walls and I’d guess that by this time these were fabulous illustrations for stories told of a past age, the ‘time of the great hunts’, with mythical heroes at their centres, when animals were mighty and everyone pranced around in luxurious leopard skin. Meanwhile the reality may have been that the first domesticated cattle were being imported from far to the East. Life, in fact, was turning much more domestic.

By 6200 BC even the pictures stopped. Perhaps the people of CH had forgotten their ancestors had ever been great hunters at all.

References

Edwards, C. J. et al. 2010, A Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequence from a Mesolithic Wild Aurochs (Bos primigenius), PLoS ONE 5(2).

Hodder, I. 2006 Çatalhöyük: The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Turkey’s Ancient ‘Town’, pp288.

Hodder, I. & Meskell, L. 2010 The symbolism of Çatalhöyük in its regional context, In: Hodder, I. (ed) “Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study”, Cambridge p33-72.

Hongo, H. et al. 2009 The Process of Ungulate Domestication at Çayönü, Southeastern Turkey: A Multidisciplinary Approach focusing on Bos sp. and Cervus elaphus, Anthropozoologica 44, p63-78.

Mellaart, J. 1967, Catal Huyuk: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia, McGraw- Hill (New Aspects of Archaeology, pp232.

Pilloud, M. A. 2009 Community Structure at Neolithic Çatalhöyük: Biological Distance Analysis of Household, Neighborhood, and Settlement, Ohio University PhD Thesis, pp774.

Pilloud, M. A. & Larsen, C. S. 2011 “Official” and “practical” kin: Inferring social and community structure from dental phenotype at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 145, p519-530.

(these two works refer to the dental evidence for relatedness or lack of it in domestic burials)

Sagona, A. & Zimansky, P.E. 2009 Ancient Turkey, Routeledge, pp408.

Türkan, A. U. 2007 Is it goddess or bear? The role of Çatalhöyük animal seals in Neolithic symbolism, Documenta Praehistorica 34, p257-266.

Çatalhöyük Research Project website

¹º²³

Why pioneers of Neolithic agriculture needed to be linked in to the wider Neolithic world, and what they did with ‘gifts’

I need to work on my punchlines

“a neolithic economy offers no material inducement to the peasant to produce more than he needs to support himself and his family and provide for the next harvest. If each household does that, the community can survive without a surplus”      Gordon Childeº

Risk is under constant discussion in the present. Limiting risk is at the heart of both economics and insurance (although apparently it doesn’t always work). From asteroid impact to little Sean stapling his thumb while at school, risk is something that we’re all encouraged to assess.

In prehistoric archaeology risk tends to be discussed not so much as a topic but as something only occasionally of interest or relevance. A quick search of the words ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Risk’ on google throws up Neolithic archaeological sites now at risk from development or, perhaps more interestingly, the risk of conflict¹.

What I’m more interested in here is the Neolithic risk of settlement failure, even without conflict or aggression, and what Neolithic people could do to mitigate it.

Neolithic isolationism

Gordon Childe, in his many books, viewed the Neolithic as a very different time from now (see the quote above). He thought of Neolithic communities as being largely isolated from each other and self-sufficient. I suspect that most sensible archaeologists don’t agree with this view now (although the continuing tendency to a national view in much Neolithic archaeology is a sort of continuation of this belief).

Renfrew, Cann and Dixon’s classic 1960′s studies of the origins and distribution of obsidian around the Aegean showed how, even in the early Neolithic, long distance exchange between groups was going on, even if in a disorganised fashion². Childe was aware of such exchange, but thought of it as either unusual or an insignificant flow of luxuries.

I suspect that, rather than being insignificant, this contact between communities through exchange of gifts may have been fundamental in preventing disaster. To illustrate the point, I offer a couple of simplistic, if ridiculous, stories in which you, dear reader, are the main character.

Story 1: Little house on the Anatolian prairie

Fifty years ago (in the Neolithic, that is) your mother and father set up a new farm away from their parents’. “Leap-frogging” onto an alluvial fan with a suitable supply of water, they grew wheat and barley. For forty seven years things went well. They raised a family, eight of you, six of whom survived, three sisters and three brothers. Luckily, you all got on really well. The farm grew enough wheat and barley for the family’s annual needs and even grew a surplus which could be stored.

And every year your family’s farm produced a surplus. Every year, the surplus from a couple of years ago, looking a little tired, would be thrown out and replaced by the fresh, new surplus, thus guaranteeing two years’ grain supply in times of need. Your family could probably have taken up a sideline in farming vermin if they’d wanted. But why complain when things were this good.

Now your mother and father are dead. Your two younger brothers have gone off with two of your sisters to start up new farms out west. You and your remaining sibling have had two disastrous years of farming through no fault of your own. Each spring has brought no rain and each summer too much. The crops have failed three times. The two year surplus was enough to get you through the first two years. This year, starving, you’re about to pack up anything you can carry and head back to where your parents came from.

Discussion

Of course the case above is ridiculous and extreme. There would be other families with you on that alluvial fan, all sharing the risk and increasing genetic health. In any one year the community’s other families might be luckier, giving you and your (now more healthily unrelated) spouse food and grain for planting, lowering your risk of failure through the community’s spirited action.

In the future (we’re still in the Neolithic, by the way) the use of animals, improved crop strains and technologies such as irrigation will have decreased a pioneer community’s risks further. But, even so, it’s only a matter of time before that chance series of bad years will cause the whole community’s crop to fail for several years. This is no strategy for long-term success in colonisation.

Reducing risk through inter-community insurance

There are obvious reasons for exchange between communities in the Neolithic. The movement of daughters was probably a common way to maintain genetic health between communities. Salt was necessary for inland communities. Small quantities of new grain strains, even animals, must have been brought in to communities through exchange. Ideas and influences would have been picked up through casual chat between individuals from different communities or from the female incomers.

In fact there must have been some sorts of mutually agreed, neutral market places, even between antagonistic communities, where such exchanges could take place. What objects were exchanged is not always easy to tell, but perhaps different communities grew some different things.

However, I suspect that the transfer of large quantities of grain or livestock between communities was probably necessary only in times of crisis and such crises were inevitable eventually. This presents an obvious problem, for large-scale food transfers would not be likely to be through goodwill, as might be the case with individuals within a community. After all, why should another community give food to a potential rival.

Offhand, I can think of three methods of food transfer: First, such transfers could have been done through brute force. Steal the other community’s crop and you have a crop. Such things undoubtedly happened -  the world is a nasty place. However, as a long term policy this was only likely to have made things worse, through an escalation of defence and warfare, increasing hostility and isolation, and decreasing both communities’ chances of survival.

Second, transfer might have been through ‘indentured’ labour, where members of the starving community would work for the other community in exchange for food. However, the problem here is that the community with food didn’t need any work done. They already had enough food. What, indeed, was in it for them?

Third, food could be ‘lent’ through a kind of ‘gift giving’ in one of the earliest forms of insurance I can think of. I will run with this in my second ridiculous story.

Story 2: Man makes himself a deal

Your village has a grain surplus. A neighbouring village is needing food due to a local flood. There’s no reason not to part with some of the grain surplus… apart from it being yours, that is. The headman of the neighbouring village is aware of your lack of fellow feeling toward his village. He comes with a group of his men in supplication.

Standing before you, he holds out a stone of no particular intrinsic worth and says, “My friend (why is that enough to put you on edge?), this stone is valued by my community for its life-giving properties. Will you accept this in exchange for some of your food? If, at some time, you yourself are short of food and we have a surplus, then you can give us back the stone and we will give you all the food you need.”

You look at the stone. It really is nothing special. It obviously hasn’t done them much good. Is he having you on?

“Er, sorry, no… not for that thing,” you tell him. The headman and his group wander off.

A week later they return. This time the headman holds out a bead of turquoise of such exquisite beauty that you can’t help but gasp. “Will you accept THIS in return for food?” he says.

“That’ll do nicely!” you say.

Discussion

There are so many interesting avenues and implications here for this scheme that my head reels. First up, the chances of finding archaeological evidence for such trade is negligible. This is because people are very unlikely to throw away such valuable stones or bury them with loved ones. They may have hidden them, but they would need to be retrievable. After all, these were their insurance policies against the bad years. This excuse for the absence of evidence is always useful in any of my arguments.

Second, the version I have described is one of relatively equal status, in which no party will make on the deal in the long term. However, this is unlikely to have always been the case. Some villages, closer to mines perhaps and better endowed in ‘gifts’, might have been able to bargain, ‘selling’ exotic stones at a higher rate than the rate for ‘buying’. In this scenario all communities would still be better able to weather the vagaries of Neolithic seasonal variation. However, some communities would be even better able to than others.

Third, individual ‘gifts’ would come to have different values in this insurance exchange system. The rarest would have the greatest insurance value, but also would tend to guarantee the fairest exchanges. And such personally neutral ‘gifts’ would also be exchangeable with other groups, not just with the original swapsters. ‘Gifts’ would, in fact, tend to be have greatest values travelling in a direction away from their source. These ‘gifts’ would now be commodities of a sort, appearing to show evidence of intentional trade.

Fourth, what I’ve described is at a village level, a form of community insurance. At what point in prehistory might individuals, by such action,  become involved in personal ‘insurance’ or wealth accumulation? Certainly, once carts and animal traction came into existence, this could lead to almost professional ‘insurance’ operations independent of communities, where individuals or small groups took on the role of brokers, exchanging their store of valuables for grain or other foodstuffs, or even other valuable ‘gifts’, over wider regions. Secondary products revolutions could then have rather different effects on society than they are generally assumed to have.

Conclusion

1 – The distribution of Neolithic pioneer farming communities

I suspect that pioneer communities had to be located in very particular environments to survive. As any archaeologist knows, they had to be located in places where there was a sufficient supply of water for crops and animals at the right times of year. Early settlements in the Levant and Anatolia are located on alluvial fans, presumably for this very reason.

However, early settlements also needed to be located in places within a chain of connection with other communities. These chains would naturally be located along preferred routes through the landscape, as was observed by Andrew Sherratt³. Any settlement sighted at a location isolated and awkward to get to, no matter how good the land, would be subject to failure eventually.

Like the parable of the seed, scattered communities might initially appear willy-nilly across the landscape. However, only those communities in the right places would survive and thrive. I suspect that this is the reason why the spread of farming across Europe was not really like an expanding bubble but more a case of spreading tendrils (this contradicts some of my earlier thoughts).

2 – The role of Neolithic insurance and ‘prestige goods’

I suspect that exchange of ‘gifts’, items of rarity and beauty, with or without function, would have been much more extensive in Neolithic farming communities than is currently realised. Greenstone, obsidian and rare copper items and turquoise beads found in Neolithic settings may be the tip of the iceberg.

Such items could be ‘purchased’ for quantities of surplus grain in good years and ‘sold’ for vital quantities of grain in bad years. Such exchanges would have been either equal or unequal depending on the nature of the items exchanged. The grain might never travel that far. However, the ‘gifts’ could travel, by hand to hand exchange, over much greater distances, their value increasing with distance from their source, even though no deliberate trade was involved. The involvement of food surplus may explain why such prestige items, even if uncommon, are still far more visible in Neolithic than in Mesolithic or Palaeolithic communities.

References

Bogucki, P. 2011 How Wealth Happened in Neolithic Central Europe, Journal of World Prehistory 24, p107-115.

ºChilde, V.G. 1942 (revised 1954) – What happened in history, Penguin, p 67.

¹Clare, L. 2010 Pastoral Clashes: Conflict Risk and Mitigation at the Pottery Neolithic Transition in the Southern Levant, Neolithics 1/10, p13-31.

²Dixon, J.E., Cann, J. R. & Renfrew, C. 1968 Obsidian and the origins of trade, Scientific American 218, p38-46.

³Sherratt, A. 2005 The Origins of Farming in South-West Asia, Archatlas.

Apart from the obvious ones at Stonehenge, are there many sarsens on Salisbury Plain? David Field thinks there are.

Reconstruction of the site of Stonehenge in 'Phase 1', before Stonehenge, showing a rather too liberal scattering of sarsens in the area (Picture courtesy of David Field at English Heritage).

I went to see a talk before Christmas at the Devizes Museum, Wiltshire, England. It was given by David Field of English Heritage, and was all about the development of the landscape around Stonehenge through the millennia. After the talk I got into a brief e-mail conversation with Dr Field about the Sarsens of Salisbury Plain. This started really due to a question about just how many sarsens there were at Stonehenge before Stonehenge was built. For anyone who’s interested, here’s the full transcript.

David: I’m pleased that you enjoyed the talk. Yes, coupled with the recent work by Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project there’s enough material accumulating to provide a new platform for Stonehenge studies for a while to come. I’ve attached the sketches of Stonehenge. There’s a lot wrong with them as you’ll no doubt soon notice, not least the missing bluestones, but we’ll work on this in the coming months and come up with something more precise.

Me: Just having a look at the sketches, they are lovely. Ok so there are a few details that are odd. But what strikes me as most odd is all the broken up sarsen lying around the area in Phase 1. I know it’s an idea that appeals to some but this amount of sarsen is very unlikely for Holocene Salisbury Plain. The evidence for it would be present as smaller sarsens not just in the Stonehenge area but widely distirbuted in the surrounding valleys due to solifluction. But perhaps more important to me seems to be the absence of large sarsens encorporated into the long barrows of Salisbury Plain. Comparison with the Marlborough Downs and the Cotswolds would suggest that such burial mounds would have used them.

David: Yes, the artist put too many in. I just wanted a thin scatter with a cluster by the mound. The next version will look a little different. There are, however, quite a few smaller sarsens around on Salisbury Plain and some were indeed incorporated into long barrows. Knook Barrow had a cairn of sarsen, Arn Hill long barrow had a standing stone, Corton long barrow had a ‘massive boulder’. Cunnington said that sarsens can be found all over the downs beneath the turf and that farmers plough them up in the area north of Stonehenge (Larkhill west of barracks) from time to time. There is a long barrow there (Figheledean 31-see attached) with three in the ditch and another six in a line where they were disturbed when the military built a rifle range. Quite a few around Bulford, aside from the Cuckoo stone (attached), Togstone and the one in the river, there is one from a round barrow that had a burial beneath an ‘immense sarsen’ and a number of others noted on early maps. One of the King Barrows formerly had a sarsen circle or kerb around it. Today the Imber to Chittern valley has many small boulders and cobbles on the slopes and in the stream and presumably many more were once visible when the area was cultivated.

As you rightly say, none of these are large in trilithon terms, but then neither are any of those on the Marlborough Downs where they rarely exceed a couple of metres – three at the most. The big ones there seem to have been reserved for the Cove and blocking stones at West Kennet. The survival of many on the Marlborough Downs can be put down to lack of agriculture (it’s a degree colder there than Salisbury Plain) for they get in the way of ploughs and soon get cleared and broken up or buried. You can trace the clearance process at Overton/Fyfield from undisturbed sarsens on the summits, to the clearance to field edges to create ‘Celtic’ Fields in the Bronze Age on the upper slopes, to the development of lyncheted fields that cover the sarsens around the edge in the Roman and medieval periods on the lower slopes. If the same processes took place on Salisbury Plain where there was widespread agriculture in Roman, medieval and post-medieval times there will be many other sarsens buried beneath the field lynchets.

So where did the big ones come from?”

Me: Not expecting a reply to this, but I guess the big sarsens must have been more common in the past in certain areas. This must largely depend on ?Miocene distribution of groundwater flow during southern England’s sub-tropical flat phase before the Plio-Pleistocene uplift. Extensive silcrete development, I guess, would be along natural fluid-flow pathways in the ground, so it would probably occur in lines.

Once uplift had taken place that variable thickness silcrete layer would have been broken up by flexure of the landscape, creating joints along directions related to the stress field. If the silcrete were thicker in certain places then the jointing would be spaced out further. Hence thicker stones would have larger sizes.

All this means is that you’d get small, possibly linear, zones where big chunks of silcrete, appropriate either for Avebury or Stonehenge, would end up at or near the surface. On highs I should imagine that they’d be exposed. In the valleys I should imagine they could end up under alluvium, although the larger ones might tend to move toward the surface (as happens in debris flows). Overall, many, through natural processes, would move down slope.

From my own observations of the Avebury area the concentration of larger remaining sarsens seems to be in the Lockeridge, West Overton area now, although obviously there are quite a few on Fyfield and in Clatford Bottom. Trying to work out their former distribution here seems quite difficult as so many have been broken up, but there must have been a fair few large ones here as many of the walls are made out of squared blocks, presumably from larger blocks broken up in the eighteenth century. I should imagine that the alluvium of the upper Kennet valley formerly contained possibly the most spectacular ones in this area and perhaps quite a lot of them. Perhaps some are still there at the valley edges.

As for the Stonehenge area what interests me is the statistical pattern of distribution. I think it would be interesting to see a cumulative frequency plot of sarsen size ranges from the two areas (not including the stones of each monument).

David: Interesting. I think that regarding statistical pattern of distribution based on size frequency the Marlborough Downs would have it as there are so few around Stonehenge. But the difference between a three metre and five metre sarsen is quite dramatic and I imagine that just one in either place could shift the balance. Its perhaps worth noting, though, that the heelstone is not exactly small and because of its shape few people will argue that it was brought from far.

Heavy mineral and grain size analysis carried out in the 80s on some of the Stonehenge sarsen indicated that it did not match samples from Clatford Bottom and Piggledene on the Marlborough Downs. Not that this really demonstrates much as sandstones can differ in composition quite dramatically over relatively short distances, except to perhaps note that, for the moment, it provides no support for the idea of a Marlborough Downs origin.

Have you seen the valley in West Woods? It was the location of a sarsen industry. As you walk up the valley you can see the hollows from where the sarsens were dug along with causeways where the trucks could load and, higher up the valley, sarsen boulders still in situ.

Me: Interesting too. I didn’t know about the heavy mineral analysis. Funnily enough me and Steph were walking Fyfield yesterday and I tried to apply the concepts I had made up to the blocks I saw. I didn’t get much joy. It’s exceptionally difficult in many places due to the clearing of blocks from fields but it’s intriguing how adjacent blocks seem often to have very little obvious relation with each other. I think they must have been washing around near the surface for millions of years and who knows what their history was during this time, let alone how much they were moved or broken up in the last few hundred years.

I remember seeing a concentration of sarsens near the Wansdyke to the west of West Wood but I didn’t know that there were some in the wood themselves. Whereabouts is that?

David: Try Hursley Bottom cSU153666

Me: As for Stonehenge, I think it would be good to compare the heavy mineral contents with those of the Avebury sarsens themselves. But to be honest I would no longer be surprised it they turned out to be quite different. I did, I admit, have a long discussion over the glacial or non-glacial origin of the ‘bluestones’ with someone called Brian Johns a while back. Again, the statistical evidence of size distribution was what swayed me toward a source at least in the Bristol channel area rather than as a moraine deposit.

(Conversation held between 20th Dec 2011 and 3rd January 2012)

A think piece for my own benefit on whether the Bronze Age Levant’s innovation is a better indicator of economic success than Egypt’s monumentality. I suspect not but I think it could be close.

Abu Simbel, Egypt

Consider the glories of ancient Egypt for a moment, whether it’s Karnak, Luxor, or Memphis, and it’s difficult to not be impressed by the majesty of it all. This was a truly great civilisation of the Bronze Age.

Compare this with the coastal strip of the eastern Mediterranean, known as the Levant, and most people would struggle to name much worth recording there from the Bronze Age. Experts know better, of course, and could mention cities such as Byblos, Ugarit, Ebla, Aleppo, Kadesh, etc (some slightly interiorish, admittedly). These were all great centres of trade in their time. Each one had a king, each could be thought of as a mini-state.

Ugarit, Syria

Perhaps the reason that they’re not well known is that they left no massive monumental ruins like the Egyptians did. Perhaps part of their problem is that these individual cities spent much of their time as vassals of other empires, Egyptian, Akkadian or Hittite.

So in terms of economic history, which should be considered more important: the mighty Egypt or the small states of the Levant?

Definitely the Levant – the case for technology

The answer seems simple. The Levantine states of course. After all, it was these states that ran the maritime trade networks of the Eastern Mediterranean, unlike Egypt that managed little more than sending boats up and down the Nile. It was in these city states that alphabetic writing was developed, ultimately usable by your average trader, whereas Egypt used cumbersome monumental hieroglyphs, largely unchanged through time, that even in their cursive form were the preserve of scribes. It was the Levant that moved rapidly into the Bronze Age when Egypt effectively stayed in the Copper Age.

This seems even clearer when one thinks of the reason why Egypt and the other great Bronze Age empires spent so much of their time fighting for control of the Levantine trade. The Levant was where the economic action really was.

Possibly Egypt – the case for monumentality

But there’s something missing here and I think it would be useful to take the example of North Korea for comparison. North Korea is effectively a failed state. The leadership continue to pretend that things are ok, with giant monuments to the glory of Kim Blah Blah, etc. and this looks very much like the kind of thing that you might see in ancient Egypt. State control in both appears to be acute. Bureaucracy and the resulting corruption necessary to get anything done must be, and must have been, crippling for both.

But here’s the big difference. Egypt maintained its standing and civilisation for over two thousand years whereas North Korea is likely to implode in less than fifty. Would historical China be a better point of comparison? I don’t really know.

North Korea is destined to fail because its economic situation is one of borrowing by a government elite without being able to afford. The economic prosperity of the system (“the productivity of the masses”, if you like) is not enough to support the spending of the elite. Ancient Egypt, on the other hand, managed to support a system of iron government control and, probably, corruption and still managed to keep going.

So underneath all of that rampant spending on useless mausolea must have been a phenomenal economy, squeezed and squeezed by elite consumption and corruption, yet still managing to turn a (largely) consistent profit, even supporting a middle class of sorts. Even allowing for recycling through grave robbing, that seems truly impressive.

Hum ho, I don’t know

The cities and towns of the Levant were not immune to such corruption and elites, but I suspect that their elites were on a much smaller scale, possibly even with limited powers over their citizens. But perhaps it’s a matter of different business models. The Levant seems to have been a great controller of East-West flow of goods (Mediterranean to Mesopotamia and Persia particularly) whereas Egypt was the great North-South controller (Mediterranean to Sahel and, perhaps, Arabia).

But I think it’s not just that. Bronze age long-distance trade seems to have been a funny thing, concentrating on high-end goods (aka luxuries). I’d guess that the Bronze age cities of the Levant traded many and varied luxuries through their entrepots, to some of which they added value to through manufacture. I suspect that Egypt traded simpler luxuries such as gold, incense, slaves and exotic animals and simply relied on absolute control of sources.

Interestingly the Bronze Age Egyptian state managed to weather the storm of the massive economic collapse and resulting refugee crisis (the “Sea Peoples”) which closed the Bronze Age. The Levantine cities were pretty much flattened. This is presumably as much to do with Egypt having a large army as anything else, but again says much about the economic power of Egypt that it didn’t simply collapse.

On the other hand, Levantine trade returned to full strength in a few hundred years whereas Egypt never did. Whatever happened at the end of the Bronze Age, Egypt’s economic basis was permanently damaged and perhaps Egypt was simply being bypassed in the new economic conditions of the Iron Age. This probably says much about the changed economic conditions of the Iron Age but I couln’t tell you what that change was.

Photo Credits

http://www.tillama.info/ (abu simbel)

Life and Death in Ancient Ugarit by Natasha Sheldon (post)

Atkinson and Gray’s soon to be classic (but, of course, potentially wrong) paper, timing splits in the Indo-European language tree, offers the fascinating chance to play the game of “match the culture”. Apart from backing up the “out of Anatolia” theory it could suggest a Non Indo-European farming spread into the Western Mediterranean and a possibly ridiculous “gold rush” causing the spread of Indo-Iranian languages east.

Atkinson and Gray’s highest probability Bayesian phylogenetic tree of 87 Indo-European languages. Dates have been readjusted to BC/AD and putative ‘splits’ in the tree have been numbered to relate to the text.

Tying the Indo-European (IE) language family into prehistory is a minefield. The only things known about the IE languages are where the living ones are spoken now, together with a written history of a few IE languages spanning, at best, the last three and a half thousand years.

Putting a timeframe on the splits in the Indo-European language family is pretty much the holy grail of palaeo-linguists and Eurasian archaeologists alike. With this information they could really get down to some serious matching up of the archaeology with the languages.

So when Atkinson and Gray came up with a ‘robust’ model attempting to date the intial break up of Proto Indo-European (PIE) it seemed just too good to be true. Maybe it is. They still seem to be sticking to it. Just for the hell of it I’m going to use their resulting language tree as the basis of some culture matching of my own. It suggests some interesting possibilities.

Atkinson and Gray’s ‘linguistic clock’

Using algorithms designed to estimate evolutionary divergence times of DNA, Atkinson and Gray took a list of commonly used words, known as the “Swadesh 200 Word List”, for ninety-five living IE languages and three dead ones.

Using a tristate (‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘don’t know’) grid of whether words in different IE languages are related through common evolutionary origin (are ‘cognate’), they attempted to estimate timing of splits between different IE languages.

This timing was calibrated using ‘known’ split times for languages such as the post-Roman Romance languages and the west German family tree (of which English is a member). Both of these seem to have split in the last two thousand years.

What Akinson and Gray put in the paper, after repeatedly running the algorithms, was the most probable family tree (they are well aware that it’s only one of many trees possible). However, all attempts dated the initial language split back to about 7000BC. The results were also ‘robust’ to errors in identification of borrowed words.

Such a family tree seems to fit well with Colin Renfrew’s idea the timing of split of IE languages, which he thinks (thought?) spread from Anatolia with the initial spread of farming into Europe. As this view is almost universally derided by experts on IE it’s certainly an interesting result.

The culture fitting game

The game I’m trying here is to see if particular splits in the IE language family tree can be linked to particular archaeological cultures, cultural expansions or events (for this I may be damned to hell). The estimated dates for the splits are given by the ‘most probable’ family tree in the paper, give or take a few hundred years. I shall attempt to use these dates, and this family tree, unquestioningly (which is, of course, unwise).

The location where each split took place is harder to work out. However, it seems reasonable to assume that it took place somewhere between the extremes of the locations of the descendant language branches. I’m aware that this is guesswork. However, it seems better than assuming that the split occurred somewhere else (as sometimes seems to be argued for in the literature).

Also, I am assuming that early Indo-European speakers farmed or were at least semi-agricultural. This is because Proto Indo-European is rich in words related to farming. This last assumption makes things considerably easier.

What causes language splits?

Languages probably start to diverge when groups of people become relatively isolated from each other. This is either because groups migrate away or, just as likely, because there is a reduction in communication (e.g. exchange) between areas. This is complicated by such things as isoglosses, where areas have different accents or even use slightly different words even though people are still in contact. Such features may reflect the dominant spheres of influence of the different areas.

To take the analogy of ancient Rome, the splitting of Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, etc) didn’t happen when people were spread across the empire. As long as there was movement of a significant part of the Roman population between areas of the Empire there was still the need to speak the same language (the lingua franca). However, mutually intelligible dialects of Vulgar Latin would probably already be emerging or exist in the different areas.

However, once trade and communication broke down between groups (as it did to a large extent during the 4th and 5th centuries) then the dialects diverged and separate languages formed. Their divergence was to different degrees though. Thus French and Provencal are more closely related to each other than Italian, perhaps suggesting a closer connection after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The splits seen in the data are rarely definitive and many different possibilities were found by Atkinson and Gray. This probably has as much to do with gradual separation of overlapping language groups as with anything. Splits are increasingly muddy as we head forward in time, as seen by the percentage of runs that gave these splits.

So the apparent ‘cleanness’ of the early splits probably has as much to do with the huge chains of languages lost between the Anatolian or Tocharian branches, say, and the rest of the IE language family, making these splits appear clean. The muddiness of later splits maybe tells of decreasing, rather than completely broken, connections between language branches later in time. Anyway, humour me. Some interesting possibilities emerge.

A prehistory of the Indo-Europeans

A possible spread of IE languages across Europe and the Near East, showing the complications of the unlikely spread of Indo-Iranian and Armenian by migration.

Split 1– Hittite from the rest (6700BC) – matched in 100% of runs

Hittite is one of several known, extinct Anatolian languages (also including Luwian, Palaic, Lycian and Sidetic) which make up the Anatolian branch of the IE family tree. All of them were situated in southwestern or central Turkey, with evidence for their existence ranging from between about 2000 to 500BC.

The origin of the Anatolian language branch is, however, undoubtedly older than 2000BC. Based on the date assigned here, it’s an easy guess to place Split 1 in Anatolia (modern Turkey). Cultures to the north and west in Europe and to the east in Iran didn’t farm yet. Cultures to the south which did farm don’t show any evidence of having ever spoken Indo-European languages.

Southern Turkey, on the other hand shows evidence of farming around 7000BC, in settlements such as Çatalhöyük and Mersin. So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük spoke Proto Indo-European. Colin Renfrew has long argued for an Anatolian association.

The reason for a language split at this time could be the expansion of farming from Turkey across the Aegean into Greece in the first half of the seventh millennium. This may have led to the gradual isolation of these two communities from each other. However, I see difficulties with this, based on the comments in the next section.

Split 2– Tocharian from the rest (5900BC) – matched in 100% of runs

The Tocharian branch of IE consists of just two extinct languages (A and B) attested only from the Taklamakan Desert, north of the Himalayas. Written evidence for these languages dates to the first millennium AD, although there is some evidence of their influence on Chinese earlier than this.

Early farming cultures occurring between Turkey and the Taklamakan desert and of the right date occur nicely in present day Turkmenistan and the Kopet Dag. The earliest of these is Djeitun (KD1), dated around 5600 – 6200 cal BC. Their agricultural style is a Middle Eastern/Anatolian one, based around barley, wheat and sheep.

It would be nice to argue that an early farming community, based on the Anatolian culture and speaking an Indo-European language which evolved with time into Tocharian, expanded or migrated east to the Kopet Dag and established farming there. The path that they took would likely have followed the bottom of the Caspian Sea, taking the route of the later Silk Road.

The only problem with this elegant solution, of course, is that the split was not with the Anatolian languages but with the rest of the IE languages. This creates a bizarre situation where people have migrated to Greece from where some turned back to pass through Turkey on their way east. It’s possible, although unlikely, and would hint at a rather more complex picture, perhaps involving Split 1 occurring within Anatolia and with more of a north-south axis, for example across the Taurus mountains.

Split 3– Greek and Armenian from the rest (5400BC) – matched in 96% of runs

The Armenian language was historically confined to the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. Written evidence goes back no further than the first centuries AD. The language shows much borrowing from other, non-IE languages of the 1st millennium BC such as Urartian, which makes it a challenge to put clearly in the IE family tree. It may also be related to Phrygian, which was more widely spoken in Anatolia in the 1st millennium BC.

Historically, Greek was confined to the Greek Peninsula, western Anatolia and the isles round about, including Crete and Cyprus. It’s first recorded in the late 2nd millennium BC in southern Greece as well as in Crete (as a possibly invasive language) in the Linear B tablets.

Split 3 is both simple and difficult. Farming spread both north, into the Balkans (the Karanovo/Starcevo/Cris cultures), and west along the northern Mediterranean (Cardial Impressed cultures) between 6000 and 5400BC so it would be understandable that some people should be left behind, marginalised and isolated in Greece during this time.

However, the expanding farming communities of the western Mediterranean and the Balkans ended up spread across vast areas of Europe. This is further complicated by the fact that the Balkan farming communities continued to expand further north and west into central Europe (the LBK culture) within this time frame.

It seems unlikely that these northern and western cultures, divided by the Alps etc, managed to stay in contact with each other yet didn’t stay in contact with those who spoke Proto-Greek-Armenian.

Four alternatives are possible. 1) Farmers who spread into the Balkans and central Europe spoke IE languages but these have left no descendants. 2) Farmers who spread along the Mediterranean spoke IE languages but these have left no descendants. 3) Farmers who spread into the Balkans and central Europe didn’t speak IE languages, 4) Farmers who spread along the Mediterranean didn’t speak IE languages.

Of these, option 4 seems the most likely to me. This is because whereas the pottery of Greece, the Balkans and the LBK shows strong similarities, the Cardial Impressed pottery of the Mediterranean farmers is different. On the other hand, it is similar to impressed pottery found in the Levant and Egypt. If Cardial Impressed cultures were part of another or other language groups from further south then these could have included the now extinct Tyrsenian family, of which Etruscan is a member.

On this basis, the expansion of a different language family in the Mediterranean would limit the extension of remaining Indo-European language cluster (at least the one’s that can be traced) to the Balkans and central Europe at this time, which would make things much easier. In any case, Greece would still be marginalised and isolated from the Balkan cultures around 5400BC.

Split 4– Albanian and Indo-Iranian from the rest (4900BC) – matched in 84% of runs

Albania is located in the western Balkans and Albanian is now limited to this general area. It has no closely related languages (ancient Illyrian may or may not be related) and is not chronicled until, at the earliest, the first millennium AD and probably the second millennium. Its language has borrowed heavily from other languages and it is one of the more difficult languages to fit into the IE tree.

Indo-Iranian languages have been found far and wide, from Anatolia and the northern Black Sea coast to Turkmenistan, across the Iranian plateau and into India. Evidence for their existence (in Turkey) extends back to around 1500BC. Evidence of their existence in Iran, India and Turkmenistan may date back to the end of the second millennium BC, based on sacred texts, although this is difficult to pin down due to the texts’ oral nature, making the dating understandably controversial.

This evidence may indicate that Indo-Iranian spread out but that Albanian perhaps didn’t. Therefore, let’s say that the ancestors of both Albanian and Indo-Iranian remained in the Balkans for the moment. The other IE languages perhaps became isolated to the north as 5000BC appears to be a time of great crisis in the LBK culture, after which it fragmented into small, regional groups.

Split 5 – Baltoslavic from the rest (4600BC) – matched in 44% of runs

Baltoslavic languages were historically spoken from eastern Europe across into the Asian steppe as far as the Urals. During this time they are known to have expanded south and east. The earliest record of Baltoslavic languages comes in the middle of the first millennium AD.

It would be natural to associate this rather muddy split with Balkan influence on the steppe. The Balkan Varna culture was at it’s height around 4500BC and there was increased contact with the peoples of the steppe via the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture at this time.

However, this would not fit with split 4 above, so using the split diagram I’d tentatively say that the Baltoslavic languages emerged from the eastern end of the LBK cultures, north of the Balkans in modern Poland, and not from the Balkan cultures.

Split 6 – Albanian from Indo-Iranian (4500BC) – matched in 36% of runs

This is a very tentative language split, I presume because of the small number of Albanian cognates in existance. As mentioned above, the Balkans were at their cultural height during the 5th millennium, producing both copper and gold on a scale not apparently seen elsewhere at this time. If we start in the Balkans we could argue that the Albanian languages stayed where they were, becoming increasingly isolated in the mountainous landscape of the western Balkans.

Copper smelting became widespread across the whole of the Iranian Plateau between 5000 and 4500BC although in Anatolia there is (so far) little evidence of it at this time. Let’s say that people representing the future Indo-Iranian language group migrated east from the Balkans, perhaps across the Black Sea to north-eastern Turkey, to introduce copper smelting to Iran. This would explain the appearance of copper smelting in Iran at this time.

The only possible evidence (perhaps slightly early?) of newcomers to Iran at this time is the widespread presence of Dalma pottery from the early fifth millennium BC across NW Iran and the Zagros Mountains which Henrickson and Vitali (1987) argue is due to strong ethnic identity, not trade. Whether Dalma pottery has any similarities to Balkan pottery of the time seems doubtful however. Whilst the settlement of Zagheh (NW Iran) disappears around 4200BC and Ghabristan starts at the same time, this may be too late and not relevant.

(To be honest, it would feel more comfortable to go with an Indo-Iranian expansion from the west into Iran around the time that irrigation agriculture spread to Iran before 5000 BC. However, it currently doesn’t fit with the dates given. Furthermore, there’s no reason to tie it to the Balkans, which is, frankly, not an area needing huge irrigation.)

Split 7 – Armenian from Greek (4400BC) – matched in 40% of runs

This rather dubious language split (again perhaps due to the lack of cognates in Armenian) should have occurred somewhere between Greece and the Caucasus. It could be the result of the Greeks remaining where they were, in Greece, while peoples speaking Armenian languages migrated (by sea?) to northeastern Turkey and the Caucasus around the middle of the 5th millennium. It would again be nice to link this event to copper smelting, as above, perhaps to the Kura-Araxes culture of the southern Caucasus. However, this culture seems to start too late, after 4000BC.

Split 8 – Celtic from the rest (now just Italic and Germanic) (4100BC) – matched in 67% of runs

Celtic languages are now limited to Britain and the western extreme of France. However, in the 1st millennium BC they extended across all of France, Portugal, northern Spain and possibly into the low countries. There is more disputed evidence for their presence in the Balkans at this time (and possibly for a migrant enclave in Anatolia). Evidence for their existence extends back to about 500BC.

Perhaps the most important event of note at this time is the decline of the Balkan copper economies, which may or may not be relevant. However, this is also the time when the great megalithic tomb cultures of the Atlantic seaboard appeared and when the British Isles were first farmed, perhaps indicating a separation and partial isolation of Atlantic cultures from their continental counterparts at this time.

Split 9 – Germanic and Italic (3500BC) – matched in 46% of runs

Germanic languages are now spread across north-western Europe from the Alps in the south to Scandinavia in the north. Evidence of their existence dates back to around 100BC. Italic languages are now spread across much of southwestern Europe but historically are known to have been limited to the Italian Peninsula and, possibly, parts of the Balkans. Evidence for their existence extends back to about 600BC.

This rather poor language split is complex to give cultural identities to, largely because European cultures were already varied and complex around 3500BC. However, I would make a guess at the geographical location of this split somewhere between northern Italy and northern Germany. The obvious northern association for the future German language family would be the Funnel-beaker Culture (or TRB), dated to after 4000BC.

Associating a more southerly culture with Italic languages is harder. However, the timing of the language split seems to coincide well with an upsurge in copper usage in Western Europe which itself lead to a decline in the long-distance trade in polished axes. As many of these axes were made in the Alps it may be that trade with the Alps ceased at this time, creating an isolated alpine culture that spoke Proto-Italian. Maybe Ötzi was a representative of this culture.

Discussion

Nice things – the Non Indo-European Mediterranean and Celtic Stonehenge

The version of events suggested above is undoubtedly wrong, although how wrong I couldn’t guess. It has large parts in common with Colin Renfrew’s theory of Indo-European expansion, which is inevitable, since I read his book years ago and absorbed it like a sponge.

However, there are a couple of small differences which I quite like, such as the idea of a non-Indo European spread of farming to the Central and Western Mediterranean. This appeals to me in the light of the strange non-IE languages that once occurred in the Mediterranean such as Linear A, Etruscan, Iberian, etc.

Another is the association of Tocharian with the Kopet Dag cultures, though this is not without problems. It also overcomes many of the arguments put in the way of an early date for IE. Personally it seems no less difficult to justify than trying to link Tocharian languages to steppe cultures far to the north.

Lastly the association of the Celtic language branch with Atlantic megalithic tomb cultures is satisfying and, if true, would make neoCelts happy.

Rubbish things – Armenian and Indo-Iranian migrations

What doesn’t work so well is the jump of the Armenian and Indo-Iranian language branches to the east. Migrations are not popular in archaeology these days and I have done my best to steer clear of them, preferring ‘spreads’. However, the above model would make them unavoidable in this case. It is interesting that the confidence of the model for these splits is pretty low.

What makes this worse is that languages are difficult to replace in pre-existing farming communities except by destruction or swamping of existing populations (I’ll discuss this in more detail in another post). This would mean that the Armenians and Indo-Iranians would either have to be murderous, diseased or have a much improved farming system that swelled their populations.

On the positive side it’s curious that both ‘migrations’ appear to occur at about the same time, around the middle of the fifth millennium (in fact about the same time as the splitting off of the Balto-slavic languages). If they really did emerge then and from central Europe it may imply a link with the success (or failure) of the Balkan copper cultures.

It is therefore possible to imagine a copper and gold rush by metalsmiths from the Balkans into the Caucasus and the Iranian Plateau around 4500BC? Do I sound too much like V Gordon Childe? What makes this beguiling (although probably really  stupid) is the later Indo-Iranian religious devotion to outdoor fire temples, recorded in the RgVeda and in Zoroastrianism.

Satem or Centum

A long-standing distinction in IE languages is whether the they show certain innovations in sounds. Perhaps the best known of these is the Satem-Centum distinction. Known ‘satem’ branches of IE are Albanian, Armenian, Baltoslavic and Indo-Iranian. Known ‘centum’ branches are Tocharian, Greek, Germanic, Italic and Celtic. Hittite and other Anatolian languages show similarities to Centum languages and are sometimes classed as such.

These innovations are mutually exclusive. Satem languages cannot develop out of Centum languages and vice versa. Centum languages are spread out from one end of the IE map to the other. This suggests that these innovations may be common and repeated in Indo-European. However Satem languages are continuous in spread, possibly indicating that the Satem innovation might have occurred once and was localised.

The family tree of Atkinson and Gray prevents the Satem development from occurring at one point in the branching tree and then spreading out. For example, Greek and Armenian are supposed to have both split off early, yet only one branch is Satem. Again this highlights the Greek-Armenian problem.

An alternative, allowed by the reconstruction above, is that the Satem innovation was an dialect isogloss, located in the Balkans around 5000BC and extending across neighbouring branches of Indo-European. If, as suggested above, people speaking Proto-Armenian, Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Baltoslavic really did come from the Balkans at this time then  it may explain why they all share this innovation even though the languages may have become partly isolated.

The wheel, horse and metal problem

One of the major criticisms of Colin Renfrew’s idea was that almost all Indo-European languages show cognate forms for ‘metal’, ‘plough’ and ‘wool’ and for words related to wheels such as ‘wheel’ and ‘axle’. All of these words are seemingly derived from Proto-IE and yet are supposed to be words for technologies too young in time to make sense for a split around 7000BC.

For example the earliest wheels are not known earlier than about 3800BC. However, for a discussion of  this topic see my rather difficult post on Indo-European Wheel Words, in which I argue that there are problems with the case against an early split date based on wheel words.

In the case of metals the earliest date for metal smelting is around 5500BC . However, this argument is easy to dismiss. Copper ornaments are known from Anatolia and Iraq in the 8th millennium BC, long before smelting (see A primer on old world metals before the Copper Age).

The case for wool also seems odd to me. There appears to be evidence for woven possibly woolen cloth from around 6500BC in Çatalhöyük. Even if this is from plucked sheep it’s still wool. However, I may have to look into this more closely, as I may have my facts wrong.

Perhaps the most interesting case is the evidence of the word for ‘plough’. There is little early evidence for ploughing until the 4th millennium BC so this is also an interesting point for further analysis.

Either way, all in all I’ve enjoyed the exercise though not I’m sure if I’m much enlightened.

References

Gray, R.D. et al. 2011 Language evolution and human history: what a difference a date makes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 366, p1090-1100.

Atkinson, Q.D. & Gray, R.D. 2006 How old is the Indo-European language family? Illumination or more moths to the flame?, In J. Clackson, P. Forster and C. Renfrew (eds) ‘Phylogenetic Methods and the Prehistory of Languages’, MacDonald Institute: Cambridge, 91-109.

Atkinson, Q.D. & Gray, R.D. ?2003 Calculating the Likelihood, (word document)

Gray, R.D. & Atkinson, Q.D. 2003 Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin, Nature 426, 435-439.

Thirault, E 2005 The politics of supply: the Neolithic axe industry in Alpine Europe, Antiquity 79, 34-50.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/courses/51/PIEMaterialCulture.pdf (List of proto-indoeuropean words)

D’Iakonov, I.M. 1984 On the Original Home of the Speakers of Indo-European, Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia (Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology) 23, p5-77 (or 87). or…

D’Iakonov, I.M. 1985 On the Original Home of the Speakers of Indo-European, Journal of Indo-European Studies 13, p92-174.

Samuelian, T. J. 2003 Armenian Origins: An Overview of Ancient and Modern Sources and Theories (internet article)

Cieslak M. et al. 2010 Origin and History of Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in Domestic Horses. PLoS ONE 5(12): e15311, p1-13.

Henrickson, E.F. & Vitali, V. 1987 The Dalma Tradition : Prehistoric Inter-Regional Cultural Integration in Highland Western Iran, Paléorient 13, p37-45.

Renfrew, C. 1987 Archaeology and Language: the Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Cambridge, pp347.

Additional References

Bouckaert, R. et al. 2012 Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family, Science 337, p957-960.

A fascinating new article by the Atkinson Team, using virus geographical tracking methods to locate the source of Indo-European to Anatolia. But then they would say that, wouldn’t they. Sorry, no pdf.

The Ness of Brodgar site on Mainland, Orkney is amazing and the BBC programme is fantastic.

I recently (well, about two months ago) watched “A History of Ancient Britain: Orkney’s Stone Age Temple”, a “History of Ancient Britain” special. This was on the Ness of Brodgar site on Mainland, Orkney. Funnily enough, I found myself coming away with mixed feelings about it. Given a couple of months to reflect on it, it has made me think about what archaeology is and what archaeologists add to and take away from it.

Ness of Brodgar Archaeology

The Ness of Brodgar excavation has been on the go since 2003. It’s located on a promontory between Lochs Stenness and Harray. Geophysical evidence suggests a significant Neolithic (around 3300-2600BC) site covering at least 2.5 hectares. What is so amazing is the scale of the architecture. Massive, rectangular walls surround multiple buildings with evidence of simple wall painting and bone carving (e.g. the “Brodgar Boy” – ? a spindle whorl), as well as polished hand axes and imported flint tools.

Although the area is already known for the equally ancient delights of Maes Howe, the Stones of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and the Barnhouse ‘village’, no-one was really expecting these new discoveries in Orkney. Arguably, this is the most exciting prehistoric excavation in the British Isles for many years.

Within these walls four larger buildings, or structures, seem to have been particularly noted by the archaeologists: Structure 1 has three doorways and three hearths. Oddly, one of the doorways appears require its user to step over a hearth, a bit like those chemical footbaths I used to try to dodge when going to swimming pools. Structure 8 is a long building with a doorway at one end and three hearths along the middle. Inside, the side walls are divided into compartments by larger piers built into the walls (to hold the roof up?). The building contained several broken mace heads and some whale bone. Structure 12 has no hearths (again odd), the same piers, and a narrow entrance at one end.

A considerably younger building (?2500BC), named Structure 10 is built over other buildings within the walls. It’s roughly square, has immensely thick walls enclosing a small central room and is surrounded by a large amount of cattle bone.

Fact and Story

All of this is fine. The field archaeologists on the site appear to have done an excellent job of recording their finds, using the latest in scientific and visualising technology. This means that although much will, inevitably, have been destroyed in the process of digging, most of the raw data will still be there for archaeologists to interpret in years to come.

And this is where I breathe a huge sigh of relief. Because many archaeologists in Britain currently seem to have no sense of where raw data ends and where stories start. To quote Neil Oliver, archaeologist and presenter of “A History of Ancient Britain”:

“[the walls were] too great to be domestic or even defensive.”

“a monumental structure unlike anything anywhere else.” (obviously not true)

“it’s easy to imagine the world within. A stone age world of ritual and religion… but when was this temple complex built?”

“for the farmers who lived here, quarrying, moving and constructing these stone buildings was a massive show of devotion.”

“stone slabs created secret spaces”

“our temple complex wasn’t only the beginning of a new belief system but of a new social order as well. The people who mediated the beliefs that went along with all of that, the priests for want of a better word, were in control. They were the theocratic leaders of Neolithic Orkney.”

Admittedly, he’s often reading from a script, but… . Anyway, sadly, he’s not the only one to merge fact and story. To quote Alison Sheridan:

“it’s surrounded by this wall so it’s a kind of sacred precinct”

To be fair, she and other archaeologists in the programme have made statements based on their years of archaeological experience with the prehistory of Britain. However, to say that Neolithic Orkney was a ‘theocracy’ or that a site was a ‘sacred’ ‘temple complex’ or that farmers were ‘devoted’ is just story-telling. When any one of us, be it professional or amateur, makes up a story about how the past was, we should, somehow, keep in mind that what we’re telling is just a story, even if we quite like it.

Orkney and Neolithic Britain

Neil Oliver (or the programme) made other statements about who did what first in Britain at this time and how the Orkney site may take some form of precedence over southern sites like Stonehenge. Certainly, Stonehenge and Avebury were built several hundred years later and the evidence from Grooved Ware pottery appears to show its spread from north to south, so such statements may be true.

The programme also suggests that Ness of Brodgar site could be the origin of the ‘ancestors cult’ of the ‘living’ (wood) and the ‘dead’ (stone) that has been argued for Stonehenge and Avebury by Mike Parker Pearson. Many of the Scottish archaeologists in the programme took understandable pride in these possibilities, although this is, of course, an anachronism of modern national identity.

But to me what’s so special about the Orkney site in relation to the rest of Neolithic Britain is this -  In Orkney, ready-made building stone, in the form of Devonian slabs, has always been easily available. On the other hand, large trees have always been in short supply here due to the wind. This makes applying Mike Parker Pearson’s theory to Orkney much harder, but that’s not my point.

My point is that this means Orkneys buildings have, since early times, tended to be made from stone rather than wood or mud. Importantly, even allowing for the time honoured pilfering of stone, ancient buildings in Orkney have a better chance of being discovered here than in most other parts of the British Isles.

This gives archaeologists a fantastic chance to reconstruct ancient ‘settlements’ or ‘temples’ in the region in much more detail than they would further south (as has previously been argued for Skara Brae). By contrast, structures of equivalent size in southern Britain would be built of earth and wood and many may have been lost through decay and subsequent earth movement by farmers and builders. This makes them difficult to detect.

Indeed happy location and pure chance have played a large part in the discovery of the few late Neolithic settlements in the south. The ‘domestic’ buildings associated with Durrington Walls, a similar, though younger, walled ‘settlement’ near Stonehenge, were discovered due to the build up of soil at the base of a slope (at the top end of the slope nothing would be left of these buildings).

And the great walled Neolithic enclosures of West Kennett, near Avebury, were discovered by chance only through the laying of pipes. These remains perhaps represent only the deepest parts of the site which have luckily escaped erosion. There is no evidence for buildings here so far.

And the locals?

Which brings me back to the Ness of Brodgar site. This massive, walled enclosure contained numerous buildings, all made in stone. The archaeologists argue that these buildings were not inhabited by normal people. But the archaeologists think the normal people built the buildings and the enclosure itself. So where did these builders live? I look forward to finding out.

References

Ness of Brodgar Excavation site

Will MacNeil’s computer pics from the television programme

Cameron Balbirnie’s summary of the program

Picture: http://blackbird-orkney.weebly.com/aerial-photography.html

Does Avebury’s collection of vast monuments represent ritual space, a failed civilisation or cosmic ordering?

Terry Dobney guarding Silbury Hill

A few months ago I was asked by my old FE College boss to give a talk to the Swindon Philosophical Society about the origins of civilisation. I spent the next few months obsessing over something I discovered I didn’t know much about. Of course it didn’t stop me having plenty of conclusions but that’s for another post when I pluck up the courage. I gave the talk a week ago to a small audience who were perplexed that I didn’t mention morals or existentialism once.

This weekend I took a walk with my partner Steph in the landscape around Avebury. It’s not the first time we’ve been there. Living in Swindon I think we must have passed it or walked through it a hundred or more times. But this time, coming from the Kennett valley into view of Silbury Hill, that massive mound of earth and sweat, I couldn’t help thinking once again about what it all meant and coming to conclusions I’d never really allowed myself to before.

Avebury’s remnants

The Avebury landscape, as seen now, is a mass of earthworks and erected stones. It’s beautiful but a little eerie. Archaeologists have dug over it with little intensity for the last hundred or so years. They have found pots, of course, as well as a few bodies, an assortment of flints and quite a few postholes. They have also given rather vague dates (which I hope will be improved) of around 2600-2200BC ish. All of these lack the spark of interest that the burial of a golden king would evoke. But unfortunately, much that could rot has rotted in the mildly alkaline soils of the chalk downland.

All of this gives Avebury a weird feeling – something that doesn’t make sense to us now. When you find a complex of big buildings, such as a shopping centre, you expect evidence of the great mass of people who passed through it – if nothing else all their litter. You also expect a Taylor-Woodrow or a king to have organised the building program. Avebury’s landscape seems to lack all that.  So people have tried to make sense of this weirdness.

Avebury story 1

The prevalent Avebury story is one of a small number of egalitarian, mythical ancient beings, on a higher religious plane from us. These strange and mysterious people carried out rites to control cosmic and earthly forces in this site of higher energy. They created a landscape of harmony with the Earth.

This idea is not new, I suppose. People have always looked for an Arcadian and better past. The only problem is who put in all the effort digging the ditches, stacking the mounds, moving and erecting the stones? Only the most extreme in their views would evoke the cosmic forces themselves to do the work.

Avebury story 2

Archaeologists are, of course, more rational in their outlook. Using the evidence of the pots, the bones and the stones they have evoked a slightly different world. Here was a strange and mysterious people. Theirs was a ritual landscape, one where people came to the area seasonally to worship whatever gods they had and to hold ceremonial feasts.

In this landscape they built great ritual enclosures from wood, then burnt them down in symbolic acts to do with life and death and rebirth. Their society was a form of chiefdom or ‘priestdom’, one with an unbroken tradition extending back to the Mesolithic and changed forever by the advent of the Bronze age.

Again, very nice, but who did all the work?

Avebury story 3 (mine)

The Avebury complex’s short peak on this Earth and its impressive monuments tell a simple story, repeated in many other centres throughout the world. Such monumental architecture, built over a short space of time, needs massive manpower to build. That manpower needs to have been highly organised, with division of labour to organise seasonal food supplies and food distribution. This is the basis for all civilisations around the world. In that respect Avebury is no exception. And that division of labour requires some form of wealth to initiate it.

What makes Avebury perhaps more interesting is that it was also a failure. This complex society never reached the crucial point of goods manufacture which turned such sites as Uruk in Mesopotamia or Erlitou in China into lasting civilisations. Why I don’t know.

How one chooses to read the past

The West Kennet Enclosures from the air (borrowed from English Heritage website)

The major argument against Avebury being a form of proto-civilisation is the lack of houses, the lack of burials of any kind, either wealthy or not, and the lack of fine art. In fact the buried evidence seems quite impoverished. Certainly their pots are not very exciting. I suspect that there’s much to be dug up and, preservation willing, more buildings still to be found. However, I don’t think it will necessarily improve the case.

But if we can’t see the large numbers of people that made the monuments of Avebury and we can’t see their wealth (whatever it was) that’s not because it wasn’t there. People’s methods of disposing of the dead vary from culture to culture. Likewise, sometimes they bury their wealth but often they recirculate it. Whatever, if archaeologists choose to interpret the huge wooden West Kennet enclosures just to the south of Avebury as being a ritual space and not an urban setting then I’m unlikely to persuade them of an alternative anyway.

Did the earliest major ‘pristine civilisation’ in South America, the Late Archaic Caral-Supe / Norte Chico culture, control trade in native silver from the Andes to the Pacific coast?

Peruvian coast, showing sites of the Late Preceramic/Late Archaic

The history of civilisation in South America seems like a minefield. So much has yet to be found or excavated. So much has been looted. Perhaps the most exciting set of developments here are the emerging evidences of two very early, ‘complex’ cultures near the Peruvian coast.

One, near modern-day Barranca, is known as the Caral-Supe or Norte Chico ‘civilisation’ (depending on who you read). It is dated from the late fourth millennium BC to around 1800 BC, reaching its zenith around 2500BC. The other culture, located in the Casma Valley 200 km to the north, is unnamed but could be called the ‘Sechin Bajo culture’. It is dated to the middle and late fourth millennium BC. Both of these fall within what’s known as the Late Preceramic or Late Archaic Period. Sometimes these coastal sites are assigned to a Cotton Preceramic Stage.

Caral-Supe / Norte Chico culture

The Caral-Supe or Norte-Chico ‘civilisation’ is represented by at least 24, and perhaps as many as 95, sites along four rivers, Rio Fortaleza, Pativilca, Supe and Huaura, around 150km north of Lima¹. The majority of these sites are located along the Rio Supe, the best known being Aspero and Caral. Other sites, such as Bandurria, in the Rio Huaura, and Cabalette, in the Rio Fortaleza, are similiarly impressive. However, Caral is still the grandest.

As well as sometimes extensive evidence for housing, all the sites have monumental architecture in the form of pyramidal platforms and ‘sunken circular plazas’. The platforms are up to 18 metres high. The plazas are round basins tens of metres across, with vertical sides up to 3 metres deep and steep stairs, perhaps good for penning wild animals. The reason why these sites were not recognised before is that the buildings were made out of adobe bricks. Thus the monuments have been reshaped over time into natural-looking hills.

Sechin bajo

This site was found only in the last few years when digging below monumental architecture from a second millennium BC site². Whilst similar in type, it’s not nearly as impressive as those of the Caral-Supe, being simply a repeatedly remodelled sunken court and low platform. However, it appears to predate the Caral-Supe sites by perhaps several hundred years. Current dating suggests that this site was abandoned by the end of the fourth millennium BC, just when the Caral-Supe sites were taking off. Not until the Ceramic Period, around 1500BC, is there evidence of new monumental structures at the site.

Caral-Supe, Sechin bajo and pristine civilisations

Both Caral-Supe and the Sechin bajo site are currently the subject of considerable debate among archaeologists. This is because they do not conform to the expected pattern of how civilisations are supposed to emerge. For a start, none of the sites shows any evidence of pottery. This did not appear in Peru until it was adopted from the north in the Ceramic Period, around 1600BC. On the other hand, there is evidence for the growing and use of cotton.

Secondly, Michael Moseley has made a case that the coastal peoples of the Caral-Supe culture lived off seafood and did not farm. More evidence is gradually coming to light to show that centres further inland did practise irrigation agriculture, growing beans, squashes and sweet potatoes amongst other things. However, even if it were true that only coastal peoples of this complex society were living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle then it would be highly significant as civilisation is supposed to come after farming.

Regardless of this, it’s currently almost impossible to see what kind of society made these sites. The people in them drew few or no pictures and had no writing (although they may have had quipu – knotted accounting strings). They clearly dug ditches and built noticeable, grand structures, so they were organised in that sense. Perhaps they liked playing games with dangerous animals. But whether they were egalitarian, feudal, communist or capitalist is currently impossible to say.

Native silver

Native Silver wires from Uchucchucua mine, Oyon Province, Peru

I am intrigued by the location of the sites in both cultures. They lie at or within a few kilometres of the Pacific coast, mostly within Peru’s highly arid coastal strip. They are all at or near the heads of rivers 150km long or even less, which drain the mighty Andean Mountains to the east.

None of these features make the sites unique. There are many such rivers, and better, up and down the Peruvian coast. However, at least for the Caral-Supe sites there is something exceptional in the mountains beyond their rivers which might have been important.

Native silver has long been mined in the interior east of these sites. Mines such as Uchucchacua, Colquijirca and, possibly, Cerro de Pasco contained, and in some cases still contain, long wires of native silver within the upper, weathered zone of the earth. From the evidence I can gather this appears to be rare elsewhere in the Peruvian Andes. Uchucchacua is still the largest silver mine in Peru.

There’s pretty much no doubt that Late Preceramic South Americans were unable to smelt silver from silver ores. The earliest evidence for smelting (from lake sediments) indicates that smelting didn’t start here until the end of the first millennium AD^.

However, at Jiskairumoko, a site 800 km to the southeast in Puno dated to around 2000BC*, there’s evidence of an exceptional burial with nine hammered and rolled, native gold beads. If Peruvians could work native gold at this time then they may have had the capacity to extract small quantities of native silver for working too.

Silver was a highly prized metal in later South American cultures. However, there’s no evidence of silver in any burial before the second milennium AD. This, of course, begs the question ‘Did early Peruvians even know about silver?’ I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The gold find from Jikairumoko is really exceptional. Metal is endlessly reuseable and is therefore unlikely to go out of circulation through burial as often as a carved shell or stone would.

If people in the Caral-Supe sites were acting as middlemen in a native silver trade from the interior to the Pacific coast then the people of the Caral-Supe culture may have been exchanging it, at least in part, for another luxury from distant Ecuador to the north, Spondylus shell, which may have been sourced by the contemporary Valdivia culture. Certainly there is evidence of Spondylus turning up in the interior (e.g. at La Galgada) by the beginning of the second millennium BC.

Discussion

Such an argument is highly speculative of course. It begs questions like ‘What’s the significance of the Sechin Bajo site?’. Perhaps more important is that archaeologists in Peru are really only at the beginning of understanding the Late Preceramic Period. There may well be many other sites of equal age and significance along the coast, just waiting to be found.

For example, a coastal site at Los Morteros, to the north, may include a pyramid that’s equally old if not older than those I’ve mentioned³. However, at the moment nothing of this early date quite matches the Caral-Supe sites in splendour and number, and I think that needs some explanation.

References

*Aldenderfer, M. et al. 2008 Four-thousand-year-old Gold Artifacts from the Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru, PNAS 105, p5002-5005.

^Cooke, C. A. et al. 2007 A Millennium of Metallurgy Recorded by Lake Sediments from Morococha, Peruvian Andes, Environmental Science and Technology 41, p3469-3474.

²Fuchs, P.R. et al. 2009 Del Arcaico Tardío al Formativo Temprano: las investigaciones en Sechín bajo, valle de Casma, Boletín de Arqueologíca PUCP 13, p55-86.

¹Jacobs, J. Q. 2000 (with amendments to 2008) Early Monumental Architecture on the Peruvian Coast: Evidence of Socio-Political Organization and the Variation in its Interpretation. (webpage)

¹Haas, J. et al. 2004 Dating the Late Archaic occupation of the Norte Chico region in Peru, Nature 432, p1020-1023.

¹Haas, J. & Perales Munguía, M.J. 2004  Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica en el Norte Chico: Excavaciones en Caballete, Valle de Fortaleza, Perú (report), pp103.

Olson, E. 2011 Geoarchaeology of the Salinas de Chao Paleo-embayment, Chao, Peru,  (preliminary report on fieldwork in the Los Morteros area)

¹Pozorski, S. & Pozorski, T., 2008 Early Cultural Complexity on the Coast of Peru, (or from here), in “Handbook of South American Archaeology” (H. Silverman & W. Isbell eds.), Springer.

³Sandweiss, D.H. 2004 GPR identification of an early monument at Los Morteros in the Peruvian coastal desert, Journal of Quaternary Research 73, p439-448. (there’s also a pdf available, try typing Sandweiss Los Morteros into google).